Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday March 04, 2012 @11:02AM
from the working-for-the-man dept.

First time accepted submitter InsertCleverUsername writes "The Department of Commerce has announced a $10,000 contest for developers making apps to utilize Commerce and other publicly available data and information to support American businesses. Developers must use at least one Department of Commerce dataset to create an application that assists businesses and/or improves the service delivery of Business.USA.gov to the business community. Developers may choose any platform. A list of developer-friendly data sets can be found on the Business Data and Tools page of Data.gov."

It's even less than that. $5,000 for first prize, $3,000 for second, and $2,000 for third. So the DOC gets three applications on the cheap. $5,000 is a lot of money in India, but it's chump change in the US.

For the amount of work required and the skills necessary to build this, a $5000 first prize is chump change. That's about the price something with a chance of winning would be if you were to build it for a paying client, unless you've already got some genius yet simple ideas for government datasets.

You're not guaranteed to win, however. You're not even likely to place. So you've sunk several days or weeks worth of work on something for a very slim chance to get a normal wage for it.

I should add, however, that you would get some free advertising/bragging rights for winning something like this, so it could still very well be worth it. Especially if you do get a genius idea for a simple little app you could knock out in a few hours.

Wouldn't they be further ahead to just publish their data as simple web services as a starting point? I see that some already seem to be, but many are just CSV files, zip files, etc . You never know when new data is available, or there's corrections, etc. It's also a little surprising that the number of downloads for the first file I tried was zero.

If one developer can do the job that 5 bureaucrats cannot, then why not fire 5 bureaucrats and give their salary to 1 developer? Or is it written somewhere that bureaucrats must remain employed while developers must continue working for peanuts?

Just need to play devils advocate here, so I guess it needs to be said that maybe the five bureaucrats, might be in charge of more than just the development of one app.
Now I'm all for efficiency in government, but it seems there's no pleasing some people. You want government to spend less, you got it, can't complain about overspending. so then you move onto something you CAN complain about. Just cut to the chase already and say you want government for defense and nothing more and save everyone some readin

But this isn't government spending less. This is government employing highly-paid bureaucrats (and they are highly paid at this point) to figure out how to pay less for highly skilled private sector work. They are not replacing people with lesser skill by people with higher skills (that would be efficient). They are offering peanuts for mundane work (ie, nothing innovate there) which requires professional experience. It's one thing for the government to sponsor basic research (because business won't inv

6. Intellectual Property Rights:
All submissions to the DOC Business Apps Challenge remain the intellectual property of the individuals or organizations that developed them. By registering, consenting to the terms of the challenge, and entering a Submission, however, the Participant agrees that DOC reserves an irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free license to use, copy, distribute to the public, create derivative works from, and publicly display and perform a Submission for a period of one year starting on the date of the announcement of contest winners.

So, for $10k they get bunches of apps which can be distributed royalty-free for a year. If an app is popular, they can change the labels (create derivative works) and continue on. Only 3 developers get any money. Everyone else may have their their app distributed with no compensation.

If you plan on paying off loans or feeding your family by developing software, you should avoid these contests. Leave the submissions to the 9th grade web design classes.

However, If you wish to make a name for yourself and can create a high quality application that is adopted by the federal government...I think you'd be showing future employers (or venture(vulture) capitalists) that you have the ability to create stellar applications.

Sometimes doing something for advertising is more important than for the pure profit. Comments like yours never seem to take that into account

So, for $10k they get bunches of apps which can be distributed royalty-free for a year. If an app is popular, they can change the labels (create derivative works) and continue on.

I agree with you all of it but the part when you talk about "derivative works" because it is not correct. You cannot modify a copyrighted work (derivative work) and claim that the new modified work is yours. The copyright law covers that part as well.

This amount is laughable. I have a few ideas for web crawler algorithms that can compile specific government data across single US government agency sites. If i were to package them into subscription based web services then I could hopefully make 50 times that by starting a business.

I once tried to convince someone trying to get into programming after a career of underemployment that programming was about solving other people's problems. If you can't find satisfaction over solving problems you didn't imagine yourself, you're not going to like programming for other people. As he was coming up with his portfolio project to demonstrate his knowledge I tried to convince him to solve a problem potential employers could relate to. But he thought it more important to bring his vision to the w